Traitements conjoints synchronisés de signaux EEG et de suivi de mouvements oculaires pour l'analyse spatio-temporelle et modélisation d'activités neuronales – GAZE & EEG

The core of this project is the joint processing of electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye tracking (ET) signals, using the advanced methods of stochastic signal processing and blind source separation to better understand the concomitance between eye movements and neural activities. Synchronizing these two sources of data is essential (1) for better denoising EEG signals which are contaminated by the electric activity generated by eye movements, (2) for exploring the functional role of eye movements (at the saccades and the microsaccades level) by directly associating them to neural markers and (3) for better modeling the cognitive processes involved in a visual and semantic task by linking functionally specific brain waves and eye fixations, because (4) such EEG ' ET associations allows to design experiments in more ecological situations. Such a project ought to be highly interdisciplinary: it involves researchers in stochastic signal processing, statistics, biomedical EEG signals, oculometry, visual and textual processing, visual perception, neuro-cognition and psycho-cognition. Several results are expected: (1) a technical platform for the acquisition and analysis of joint EEG/ET recordings, (2) new techniques for removing EOG artifacts in EEG, (2) new method for extracting eye micro-saccade contributions in EEG -which is actually a very challenging and risky issue-, (3) scientific results on the functional role of saccades and micro-saccades and (4) a cognitive model able to predict an average user scanpath on a complex document composed of text and image, in information searching domain.